Seminar
Harriet Pollatsek
Professor, Mathematics
Mount Holyoke College
"Where the Railroad Tracks Meet: An Introduction to the Projective Plane"
What happens if we discard the parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry and assume that parallel lines "meet at infinity"? And on top of that radical thought, what if we assume that our geometry contains only finitely many points? Questions like these lead us to a finite geometry with connections to experimental design via Latin squares. Along the way, we'll see that sometimes even the great mathematician Euler can be really, really wrong.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Warner 202
3:15 p.m.
Refreshments at 3:00 p.m.
All are welcome to attend!